Uh-oh. At least two European Commissioners will be sent to bed without dessert tonight (or, whatever the appropriate punishment actually is for naughty members of the European Union’s executive arm… Perhaps representing the commission at the next meeting with angry parliamentarians?).

Wednesday morning – a good three hours before commission boss José Manual Barroso was to take the stage and give EU countries their annual rap on the knuckles for bad budgeting or policy making – Industry Commissioner Antonio Tajani sent a digital flare to his native Italy: All good, he indicated via his official Twitter account, Rome is about to be released from the purgatory that is the EU’s “excessive deficit procedure.”

@EU_Commission recommendation for a Council decision abrogating decision on the existence of an excessive deficit in Italy

Employment Commissioner Laszlo Andor, Hungary’s emissary to Brussels, did the same for his home country and signaled, in Hungarian, that Budapest also won’t be facing sanctions for its spending overruns.

Messrs. Tajani and Andor were live-Tweeting Wednesday’s commission meeting, in which all 26 commissioners, along with President Barroso, had to sign off on the so-called country-specific recommendations and the excessive deficit procedure — both parts of the EU’s economic surveillance system. It’s hundreds of pages of economic and policy jargon that for some countries — Italy and Hungary come to mind — could weigh heavily on national decision-making in coming years.

A number of journalists had pleaded with the commission to release the documents in advance under embargo, giving them more time to prepare their coverage. Impossible, they were told, since doing so before the commission meeting had finished could lead to wrong reporting. “This needs some political decisions by the college,” commission spokesman Olivier Bailly said Tuesday. “Until the political decision is taken, the documents won’t be public.”

How about releasing information country-by-country, as each got the commissioners’ nod? No way, Mr. Bailly said, that would just get him in trouble with reporters from countries last in line, since they would have less time to set up their stories.

Seems Messrs. Tajani and Andor weren’t listening to that briefing. Their tweets triggered some request for other commissioners to follow suit. (Isabelle Ory, from France’s Europe 1, implored Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier to tweet the commission’s recommendations for France, but without luck.)

Other commissioners were decidedly more tame in their live tweets. Most countries will be asked to preserve spending on research, education and innovation, wrote Education Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou, hardly surprising anyone. But then her home country Cyprus has had its recommendations in the form of a bailout program for quite some time.

Not everyone was thinking about serious policy making during the commission meeting, though. Environment Commissioner Janez Potočnik had this to share with his followers:

In Brussels tomorrow night? Why not support this great Irish concert for charity. Tickets available at the theatre http://t.co/6LQ3oDebJN

About Real Time Brussels

The Wall Street Journal’s Brussels blog is produced by the Brussels bureau of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. The bureau has been headed since 2009 by Stephen Fidler, who was previously a correspondent and editor for the Financial Times and Reuters. Also posting regularly: Matthew Dalton, Viktoria Dendrinou, Tom Fairless, Naftali Bendavid, Laurence Norman, Gabriele Steinhauser and Valentina Pop.